Book Review: Landscape and Englishness

Abstract

In recent years the relationships between landscape, culture, society and national identity in England in the interwar years have been of considerable interest to geographers, historians, and literary critics, amongst others. It has quickly become apparent that these relationships are far from simple and each new piece of writing reveals new complexity, contradictions and conumdrums. This is the case with this book. The broad theme – the intertwining of landscape and senses of Englishness – is a familiar one. But the highly textured account presented in Matless’s book demonstrates in considerable detail that what we think we know about landscape and national identity in the interwar years is far from a complete story (if such a thing can ever be achieved). Matless argues that ‘the power of landscape resides in it being simultaneously a site of economic, social, political and aesthetic value, with each aspect being of equal importance’ (p. 12). Organizing and making sense of this much material amounts to a massive task for any author attempting to put together a story of landscape and Englishness, but Matless makes an excellent job of it. The book is characterized by his ability to make all kinds of connections between events, people, places and ideas, and the main work of the book is to give us a much greater understanding of the detailed context within which attitudes towards and ideas about landscape developed in the interwar years and beyond. He also makes some attempt to show the connections between past and contemporary attitudes. The book covers the period from 1918 to the 1950s in four broadly chronological parts. The first chapter in each part deals with different versions of landscape and the second discusses their connection to questions of citizenship and the body. Part I looks at the emergence in the 1920s and 1930s of a movement for the planning and preservation of landscape. This is a familiar argument from Matless but presented in much more depth here. There is a nice passage on Baldwinite Conservatism which shows how Baldwin’s often-quoted speech on England ‘accommodated a quiet, ordinary, evasive little England, not the assertive English future envisioned in the preservationist movement’ (p. 30). There is also a sustained account of the meaning of suburbia and ribbon development. The material throughout is richly contextualized, a strength of the book overall. Part II provides a contrast to Part I by examining the work of organicists in creating a counter-current of Englishness and a different kind of physical engagement with the landscape. Here Matless succeeds in demonstrating ‘the interconnectedness of issues held apart elsewhere’ (p. 30). In Part II, the chapter on ‘English ecologies’ is complemented by one on ‘The Book reviews 477